A New York Love Story
by Scribbler
Summary: Pegasus was once a 17 year old boy on the verge of getting everything he wanted. Roses wither quickly in a city of glass and concrete. Some lose their petals faster than others. Now his Eye and his plans to return Cynthia are gone, what's left for him?
1. April Showers

**Disclaimer****:** They're mine! Oh, wait … not they're not. My bad.

**A/N****:** This was originally part of the _As Deep as the Sky _collection of ficlets, but it developed into a trio of sequential vignettes that told their own story, so I decided to give them their own space. The original brief of the collection was: 'Pick a fandom, turn on your music player and put it on shuffle, then write a ficlet inspired by each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish; you start when the song starts, and stop when it's over.' I'll admit by the time the third part of this trio came around I took a little extra time to finish the arc, but the first two vignettes stuck to this brief.

**Extra Bit****:** According to WikiFic, Pegasus is actually from America, not Japan. Darn the dub for not making that clear.

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_**A New York Love Story**_

© Scribbler, August 2008.

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**1. **_**April Showers**_** – Sugarland**

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"Cynthia?" Pegasus gasped in surprise when he opened the door.

She was wet through. Unsurprising, since it was raining buckets – the type of rain that was really just upright ocean with slots in it. Her usually flowing blonde hair was plastered to her skull and hung down the back of her sodden dress.

"Can I come in?" Even though the storm was loud, her voice kept its habitual softness, so that he barely heard her.

Embarrassed that he was still holding the door only half open, Pegasus immediately jumped backwards and ushered her inside. She dripped all over the expensive hall rug, but he was more worried about what had driven her out into such an abysmal night in the first place. Shepherding her into the drawing room, where there was already a fire in the grate, he fetched towels and blankets and one of his mother's robes. His parents were out of town, so it was just him and the servants, most of whom had gone home for the night. Only Wilkins, the groundskeeper, was still on the property. Presumably it was he who'd let Cynthia past the gates.

"What on earth is the matter?" Pegasus asked when he returned with a hot drink to warm her insides. He'd considered putting a nip of his father's brandy in, but decided against it. "Are you all right? You looked half-frozen. Is everything okay at home? Is it your father?"

Cynthia and her father had a difficult relationship, though Pegasus had always been under the impression he still cared for his daughter, despite disapproving of her choice in boyfriends. Mr. Delos wanted Cynthia to get married someday, but only to someone staid, perhaps a lawyer or a politician, and make lots of grandsons for him. The Crawford family had money, but Cynthia's father had no time for 'layabout artists'.

"I … yes." Cynthia stared into her hot chocolate as though searching for more than just how many marshmallows he'd put in. "I've left. Home, that is. I … they wouldn't let me see you. They locked me in. they were going to send me away to relatives in England, so I … I ran away."

Pegasus's eyes widened. "They locked you in your own house?"

She shook her head. "Not in the house, in my room. I climbed down the vines outside my window in the end. I've never done anything like this before, but when Daddy heard I wanted to marry you, he was livid -"

"Excuse me? When he heard _what_?"

She laughed then. He'd always loved her laugh, but right now he was too consumed with the sound of his own thundering heartbeat to hear it. "I'd decided to be a real modern woman and ask you instead of you asking me. I had a ring on order at the jeweller's. I was planning to pick it up yesterday, but they called to verify a collection time and Daddy answered the phone."

"Cynthia, let me just get this straight." Pegasus took one of her hands in his own, leaving the other to hold her drink. She was trembling. Fearing she'd scald herself, he removed the mug to the coffee table and clasped both her hands in his own. She had long, pianist fingers, while his were the hands of a painter – both of them talented artists in their own fields. "You … want to marry me?"

"I know were' young, but … I love you. I did have a flowery speech planned, but that's what it comes down to. I love you, Pegasus. I want to share my life with you, with or without my father's permission." She smiled. More than her laugh, he adored her smile. Shy and half-lidded, like a flickering candle flame, it never failed to captivate him.

Pegasus swallowed. He couldn't believe it. The rain thrumming against the window, the fire warming the room, the taste of her lips; these were things he understood and could frame in his mind. But marriage. Being Cynthia's _husband_ …

They were seventeen and smitten. They'd been smitten since they were children and met at one of her father's dazzling parties, and from that day forward this moment had been inevitable. None of his friends had ever been able to understand, but then again they'd never taken Cynthia seriously about anything. They called her Rapunzel, but it was a cruel nickname, intended to highlight how she was kept away from the rest of the world in a tall tower, and had no idea what the world below it was like. To them, she was a child and not worth thinking about compared to other girls.

But not to Pegasus.

"I always imagined myself on one knee," he murmured into her rapidly drying hair. "Possibly with an orchestra crescendoing in the background."

She laughed. "I have relatives in New York who can help us. They fell out with Daddy years ago, but we'll have to be quick, otherwise I'm sure he'll find a way to stop us."

"It's April now, so … how does a May wedding sound to you?"

"Wonderful. May is when roses bloom. They're my favourite flower. I always wanted a wedding filled with roses."

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	2. Fall to Pieces

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**2. **_**Fall to Pieces**_** – Avril Lavigne**

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"Cynthia?" Pegasus held her close. "Cynthia, what's wrong?"

She didn't answer. Around them, the church was in chaos. Only his relations and select members of her family were there, less than thirty people in all, yet there seemed to be hundreds of feet slapping against the floor and hundreds of cell-phones making the same three-number call.

Pegasus was oblivious to it all, having eyes only for Cynthia. He'd watched helplessly as, her lips so close her felt her last breath, his fiancée's eyes rolled up into her skull and she collapsed. He'd grabbed for her, catching her awkwardly and jarring her shoulder almost out of its socket. She didn't even cry out, but what his eyes and mind told him, his heart still refused to believe.

He'd always known Cynthia had a congenital heart defect. It was one of the reasons she was so delicate, and why her father was so protective of her. She'd grown up in a rarefied atmosphere, with little idea of what real life was like. Still, her innocence was one of the things he loved most about her. Her vibrancy always outshone her paleness, and her love of life made him forget those times she was so tired she could fall asleep anywhere – feeding ducks in the park, at dinner with celebrities, posing for one of his paintings. She was like some strange, fairytale creature, too delicate for many of her kind to exist on this side of the divide between fantasy and reality.

Or at least, to exist for very long there.

Pegasus had always loved New York. He enjoyed the energy of the place, and the architecture so many cities around the world tried to emulate. New York was cutting edge. Cynthia didn't share his love of the place, preferring open fields and gardens. Now he was very conscious that they'd had to import the roses for their wedding from other places. New York was too much a city of concrete and glass.

"Cynthia, please," he begged, voice cracking. "Please, don't leave me. Not now. Not when we're so close to having everything we ever wanted."

But Cynthia didn't reply.

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	3. There and Back Again

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**3. **_**There and Back Again**_** - Daughtry**

Anzu wasn't sure what compelled her to check out her grandmother's grave. It wasn't like she'd ever met the woman, since Grandma Gardner died when Anzu was less than a year old, and disapproved of her son marrying a Japanese girl so much that she didn't even go to Domino for their wedding. She'd wanted nothing to do with her first grandchild.

Anzu's family on her father's side were all born and bred New Yorkers. Her father had followed his heart to Domino as a student, but returned home after the break-up of his marriage proved stronger than adolescent love. Anzu spent large chunks of the year with him, and had dual citizenship, which had made her decision to move to Manhattan after high school much easier. She'd elected to go to a college in America instead of Japan, finally turning her pipe-dreams of a professional dancing career into a reality.

Moving had also made her curious about the side of her family she'd only seen a handful of times on special occasions. They had their own lives, and when staying with her father before she'd barely glimpsed them. Her father was thrilled she'd be moving in with him for a while, and had encouraged her to build bridges with his relatives and turn these glimpses into a proper relationship.

"They'll love you once they get to know you."

"Sure, Dad," Anzu had replied without enthusiasm, not at all sure they would.

"Well at least say hello to your grandmother. _She_ can't do anything to put you off the rest of them, at least, and everybody should know what kind of stock they come from."

"_Stock_? What am I, a breeding experiment?"

Grandma Gardner had apparently been some big society girl back in the fifties. Her grave was in a cemetery on a hill in one of the few green parts of the city.

Anzu stood outside the gates for a long time before going in. It felt weird; visiting the final resting place of some woman she'd never met. Plus there was the whole ickiness factor that made her stick rigidly to the path. Americans buried _bodies_, with only a few people electing to be cremated, and the graveyards full of haphazard headstones were like a mouthful of half-rotted teeth. American cemeteries weren't nearly as well-maintained as they were back in Japan – or as crowded. Great-Granny Mazaki practically had to get into the family plot _before_ she was dead, just to make sure she got a space when it was her turn, but Grandma Gardner's grave had space all around it and a headstone just for her.

_Weird. _

When she'd paid her respects, Anzu turned to leave. She was startled to realise she wasn't the only one there. She began to creep away, infused by the strange feeling that filled this place, like libraries with really strict librarians. Then she stopped, one foot raised as, unbelievably, she _recognised_ the other figure.

_What the … What is __**he**__ doing __**here**__?_

Weirder than him being there was the fact he was alone. No bodyguards, no attendees with giant spikes of hair, no PA with a PDA or a PHQ or whatever. Just him, staring at a huge stone angel that was bigger than anything else in the place.

Anzu wanted to leave. She knew she should hate this man. He'd caused her friends so much heartache, and whatever good deeds he'd done afterwards couldn't blot out all the unnecessary hurt he'd caused. She wasn't as forgiving as Yuugi, and without him there she was even less inclined to make amends with someone who had _literally_ tried to kill, mentally torture, _and_ steal the souls those she most cared about.

So she was even more surprised than him when her footsteps took her to his side and her voice said, "Are you okay?"

Pegasus jumped. His silver hair moved slightly, revealing a glimpse of ugly red scars it usually covered. For someone who picked invisible lint off his own suit, she wondered why he risked scaring small children in a stiff breeze instead of wearing an eye-patch or something. Was it some kind of penance? She'd never figured Pegasus as the type.

Then again, she'd never figured Ryou for the type to dig out someone's eyeball using his bare fingers. The fact it'd actually been the Spirit of the Millennium Ring didn't make the memory any less disturbing, especially since it problematised her dislike of Pegasus. Those scars looked like they'd hurt.

He glanced around.

"Nobody else is here. Just me. I live here now – or at least I will permanently at the end of the Summer. You don't."

He blinked his one good eye at her. "No," he said eventually. "I don't." He looked back at the angel. "But I did once." He sounded nothing like the arrogant melodramatic butthole she knew. He sounded how he'd looked from a distance – lonely and incredibly sad.

Despite her better judgment, Anzu's heart clenched for him. She made a note to give it a good talking to later. It was one thing feeling sympathy for villains who weren't actually that villainous, but it was another wanting to give them a comforting hug.

Ugh.

To distract herself, she read the name on the plaque. "Cynthia Delos."

"She kept her own name because apparently we weren't legally married when she died." Pegasus's voice switched from sad to bitter. "I contested it, of course, but her father was insistent. He had very good lawyers, and I wasn't exactly in my right mind at the time …" He trailed off, as though wondering why he was telling her this.

Why _was_ he telling her? Too much – _too_ _much! _He wasn't supposed to be a person. This was dangerous territory. The urge to leave once again surfaced in Anzu, but years of being friends with Yuugi had apparently rubbed off more than she thought. Her feet wouldn't move.

Pegasus loosed a single barking laugh. "You've caught me at my most vulnerable, and I'm still not even sure of your name. Yuugi-boy's Cheerleader Number Three, was it?"

Anzu tried to bristle. She did. "Close. My name's Anzu Mazaki. Cynthia was the name of the lady you mentioned in your diary, wasn't it?"

Pegasus was quiet for a long time. Anzu belatedly realised that he may not have been aware that she and the guys not only found his diary, but read it back in Duellist Kingdom. _Oh … nutbunnies. Can you be arrested for invasion of privacy? I don't think the police would believe my story that he'd just tried to trap people's souls in Duel Monsters cards and that's why we felt justified breaking and entering his rooms –_

But instead of reprimanding her or acting offended, Pegasus spoke softly. "She loved roses," he said, placing the one in his hand on the grave. "I lay one whenever I'm in New York."

_Please stop acting so pitiful. Please say something horrible. I like you better that way. _"You wanted to bring her back with the Millennium Items." Anzu clung to this fact.

"Something like that." Pegasus went on blithely ruining her mental image of him by saying, "I'm not the same man I was then. I'm not the same boy I was at seventeen, either."

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

Anzu focussed on the angel's carved, blank eyes. "You're, like, one of my least favourite people in the world, you know. This is all some giant joke, me finding you here on the other side of the world, in a graveyard, in a city neither of us live in. It's a joke, and I'm the punch line."

"You've broken my heart. I shall never recover from this terrible blow of rejection from a teenaged girl with bad fashion sense."

She gritted her teeth. "Even so, nobody should be left to mope in a graveyard on their own."

"I'm touched. Truly. I think I might even shed a tear."

"Are any of your bodyguards around?"

"I told them to wait in the car."

"Good." She punched his arm.

If he looked surprised before, he looked stunned now. He was probably used to people not even _breathing _on him wrong. It wasn't every day you got a Mazaki Good Sense Wallop. Well, unless your name was Jounouchi, of course. She even refrained from putting all the force of her memories into it. If she had, he probably would've ended up embedded in the side of the church fifty feet away.

"Please tell them I was just stopping you from moping before they shoot me from the window or something."

Pegasus stared at her. "You do realise I could have you arrested for that."

"I don't think you will."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Nothing."

"You are … a very strange girl."

"Hey, I'm a seventeen-year-old near-apocalypse-survivor living in New York. I'd say I'm pretty well adjusted, given _those_ circumstances."

"Seventeen …" Pegasus looked back at the grave.

"I don't turn eighteen until the end of the summer, but I'm still a college girl. Almost."

"Hmm."

"You're not planning on the best way to suck out my soul, are you? People would notice if I went missing. My dad knows I'm here, and there are probably witnesses in the church."

"The windows are ten feet off the ground. Nobody could see a thing through those unless they were hanging from the rafters." Pegasus looked at the windows in question. "This is where she died. We were nearly married here. Hardly the most extravagant place in the world, but I was so much easier to please, back then."

Anzu felt uncomfortable. She shifted from foot to foot the way she always did at the barre before beginning her ballet practise. "You did it all backwards, you know."

"I did what?"

"Bad guys are supposed to do horrible things and then get punished. It's karma. You're, like, karma in reverse. Like, you thought you had to do bad stuff to other people to make up for what'd already happened to you – the pay it forward scheme, only sicker."

"Haven't I redeemed myself yet? I did have my soul stolen by Dartz, you know."

"I guess." Anzu frowned. "Although I don't think you're supposed to trade off bad luck against evil deeds like that."

"You're not very forgiving are you? I would've expected more from one of Yuugi-boy's fan club."

"Hey! I'm not just Yuugi's sidekick, you know! I happen to have a personality of my _own_. Not that _you'd_ ever know it."

Pegasus raised his hand to the left side of his face. Instinctively, Anzu flinched, and he froze. Slowly, he lowered his hand.

"No, I suppose I wouldn't."

"Good." Blushing at her reaction, she nonetheless eyed him warily. "Would you like to go get, I don't know, a coffee or something?" _Gawd, I have __**got**__ to stop picking up strays and being nice to former psychopaths -_

"Are you trying to ask me out?"

Her spine straightened so fast several vertebrae clicked. "What? Yuck, no! You're old enough to be way creepy as date material. I'm just trying to be a nice person. It's a humanitarian gesture."

"You make me sound like care in the Community. I'm not _that _old." Pegasus looked at the grave for a few silent seconds, and then nodded briskly. "Perhaps a trip into the lower echelons of society with a former adversary is what's called for. There's much to be said for the mitigating effects of Yuugi-boy and his people. I would be delighted for you to treat me to a coffee, as long as it's not any of that regurgitated swill from Starbucks or its homogenised ilk."

"Wait, what? _Me_ treat _you_? I'm living on a budget, and you're a zillionaire!"

"And? You asked me. It's therefore social propriety that you foot the bill."

She scowled, trailing after him and treating him to a piece of her mind. The words flowed easily, but the Anzu who first walked into that cemetery would've been a lot more venomous.

The stone angel watched them go with impassive eyes, as it'd watched hundreds of times before when Pegasus came here. This time, however, the pale translucent girl standing next to her smiled, and for the first time in years she didn't cry for what her beloved had become.

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_**Fin.**_

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**A/N****:** In ancient times Cynthia was a cult title of the Greek god Apollo, not a girl's first name. Eventually it passed into common culture to call girls 'Kynthia', after 'Kynthos', meaning Mount Kynthos on Delos, the island on which Apollo was born. Kynthia is where we get Cynthia, and that's also how Pegasus's fiancée got her maiden name in this fic.


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